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So Odd, but Lately in Classic Fashion

ON a break from rehearsals for “Cymbeline” at Lincoln Center Martha Plimpton dashed outside for a cigarette and immediately ran into a classmate from her alma mater, the nearby Professional Children’s School. It turned out he too was still performing, as a dancer at the Met. They chatted briefly about work and compared notes about Lincoln Center’s employees-only canteen, which evidently serves excellent chocolate-chip cookies.

That’s just one of many insider secrets Ms. Plimpton, a native of the Upper West Side and a working actor since the age of 8, has collected about the theater complex. She knows how to sneak into the Met’s orchestra pit and how to work the high-tech Japanese toilets in the dressing rooms. As teenagers, she and her friends would descend on the adjacent performing arts library to listen to classical records on shared headphones.

“This whole area was like my playground,” she said as she stubbed out her cigarette and headed back into the subterranean backstage.

Since last October, when she played dual roles in “The Coast of Utopia,” Tom Stoppard’s Tony-winning trilogy about 19th-century Russian intelligentsia, Ms. Plimpton has bunked in Lincoln Center’s dressing rooms, with a brief field trip to play Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Shakespeare in the Park over the summer. Which means that for more than a year she has walked to work, following almost the same path from her Upper West Side apartment — the same one she lived in as a child — to the theater, commuting from one home to another, toting talismans like a statue of Sarasvati, the Hindu goddess of the arts, and a tiny lucky pig. They’ll watch over her during “Cymbeline,” which is to open Dec. 2; the production, directed by Mark Lamos, also stars John Cullum in the title role and Phylicia Rashad as his wife.

And after nearly 30 years as an actor, Ms. Plimpton, 37, has found both. Though she has earned praise and even a comparison to Meryl Streep for her humor and versatility over the years, it is only recently that her position changed from indie character actress to classics star.

“She’s the secret weapon,” said Jack O’Brien, the director of “The Coast of Utopia.” “There’s something incredibly modest about her and charmingly evasive. She doesn’t lead with her ego. It’s a sort of camouflage that she uses because, truth to tell, she’s the real thing, and everybody knows it.”

Or perhaps they will after “Cymbeline.” As Imogen, the princess daughter of the titular king of Britain, Ms. Plimpton carries one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known and least-produced historical romances. Written late in his life, the play is as full of plot twists as a soap opera and, in Lincoln Center’s revival at least, nearly as fantastical. Ms. Plimpton plays both breast-heaving romantic heroine — it is her secret marriage to an undesirable (Michael Cerveris) that sets the story in motion — and adventurer, when she later flees the royal household and winds up a cross-dressing page. Along with the pig and the goddess, on her dressing table there is a boxed Barbie princess, a first-preview gift from Mr. Cerveris, and a reference to Ms. Plimpton’s character, if not the actress herself.

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Martha Plimpton backstage at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, where she is working on Cymbeline." She knows the insider secrets of Lincoln Center from a lifetime of living in the neighborhood and from appearances onstage there.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

“Imogen is a modern Renaissance woman,” Ms. Plimpton said. “She is in many ways a figure of guileless love and honesty who is also very human and has her own frailties and insecurities and rebellions. She is one of the most odd and, simply on the page, captivating women in all of Shakespeare, and it’s one of his most beautiful, odd plays.”

Later she added: “I feel comfortable in the presence of oddity. Probably because I’m a little bit odd.”

The daughter of the actor Keith Carradine and the former actress Shelley Plimpton, she had an unorthodox upbringing that taught her, she said, “to find pleasure in chaos, to find order in chaos.” Her approach includes that walk to work, the totems and a methodical preshow routine, complete with nap.

With a gamine frame, oversize features and a signature pixie haircut (a friend cuts it), Ms. Plimpton looks and sounds quirkily adorable, like a grown-up Lisa Simpson. Her style and presence too are kinetic and youthful: She wears skinny jeans and printed hoodies and laceless Chuck Taylors, and sits with her legs tucked under.

She grew up saving money for jazz clubs and double features at the decrepit Thalia. “I’ve been doing old-people things since I was a child,” she said. “I like things that are civilized.” But she also updates her own MySpace page, posts silly videos and does killer karaoke.

At an Upper West Side cafe she chose but did not want named — because it’s tiny and would be easily overrun and, especially, because she’s allowed to smoke inside (another secret) — she copped to her oddities over a few glasses of Sancerre, nearly half a pack of American Spirits and one hard-boiled egg.

Ms. Plimpton’s parents met while acting in the original production of “Hair” in 1969. But Mr. Carradine, a scion of the acting family, decamped to Los Angeles before his daughter was born — he was 19 at the time — and Ms. Plimpton was raised by her mother in a rented two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. She still rents it, sleeping in her childhood bedroom; she transformed the other into an office after her mother remarried and moved to Seattle when Ms. Plimpton was about 18. (Ms. Plimpton passed on college, preferring to work.)

By his own account Mr. Carradine was not involved in his daughter’s early life, but now they are close. He said he planned to be in the audience for the opening night of “Cymbeline.”

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Ms. Plimpton and Michael Cerveris in "Cymbeline."Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“I feel like I’ve inherited from him and his side of my family a sense of knowing my job and what’s required of a person in this line of work,” Ms. Plimpton said. “To recognize that when you do this for a living, you have to be willing to take the good with the bad. There’s a great familial pride in the history of that. It’s like coming from a family of really great plumbers — we’ll do mansions and we’ll do shanties, and there’s pride in all of it, as long as it’s done well.”

Mr. Carradine, in a telephone interview, said that while it was clear that Ms. Plimpton would be a performer from the time she was a child, he had never given her professional advice. “She’s a much better actor than I am,” he said. “I stand in awe.”

Ms. Plimpton made her professional debut at age 9 at the Public, in “The Haggadah,” an avant-garde musical retelling by a director her mother knew, Elizabeth Swados. At 11 she did her one and only commercial, for Calvin Klein, alongside Andie MacDowell and Shari Belafonte; it was directed by Richard Avedon. That led to a string of film roles, including the spunky friend in “The Goonies,” from which she is recognized nearly every day. (The conversation is brief, Ms. Plimpton said. People ask, “Are you the girl from ‘Goonies’? I usually end it in the affirmative and continue walking.”)

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Largely because of her mother, she didn’t follow the usual cherub-child star trajectory from commercials to Hollywood to rehab and back. Instead, even while she made well-received films like “Running on Empty” (1988), she worked in downtown theater. Still, she used to wish she had become an actor later in life, because then, “I would somehow be better at it,” she said.

That belief changed with “The Coast of Utopia,” for which she earned a Tony nomination. (She played the revolutionary Bakunin’s wife, Varenka, in the first play and had an emotional breakdown/love triangle as Natasha Tuchkov Ogarev by the third.) “There was something about feeling like I was there because I earned my place to be there that was really powerful for me,” Ms. Plimpton said. “As someone who’s been doing this truly my whole life, it was a wonderfully freeing and profound experience.”

Immediately after this revelation, she grew uncomfortable, worrying that she sounded too earnest and precious about her job. Only one person she knows can talk about acting and not sound pretentious, she said, “and that’s Ethan Hawke.”

“I resent that,” Mr. Hawke, Ms. Plimpton’s friend and “Coast of Utopia” co-star, said in a telephone interview. They met through River Phoenix, Ms. Plimpton’s boyfriend when Mr. Hawke first moved to New York in the late ’80s. (Despite what her Wikipedia entry claims, Ms. Plimpton never dated Christian Slater. The comedian Fred Armisen was a recent boyfriend, but Ms. Plimpton is single now; she and Mr. Hawke never dated, that he can recall.)

“I remember meeting her and feeling like she had the keys to the city,” Mr. Hawke said. “She always knew which diners to go to, which movie theater showed cool films, which clubs had good bands.”

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Ms. Plimpton with Jennifer Ehle in the Voyage segment of The Coast of Utopia.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

He added: “A lot of people who have success young can use the inevitable humbling of adult life as permission to fail, and Martha has always thrown herself back at her work. Doing Shakespeare in the Park, doing Tom Stoppard, Lincoln Center — when we were kids, that was the dream.”

That Ms. Plimpton’s dream did not involve Hollywood fame was clear to everyone; except for about a year, she has never even lived in Los Angeles. “Her mother’s influence really kept her centered and level-headed and not seduced by the dark side of the business,” Mr. Carradine said.

But her childhood success helped give her the financial stability to stay in the theater. She became a member of the Steppenwolf company in Chicago in 1998, later starring in “Hedda Gabler” (her father’s favorite performance) and directing a play there. In 2004 she made her Broadway debut, in the drama “Sixteen Wounded.” Though she continues to do some TV and film work — a part on “Law & Order: SVU” earned her an Emmy nomination in 2002 — she has mostly focused on the stage, partly because her unconventional appeal does not necessarily lead to the parts she wants.

“She’s utterly unique and I think absolutely exquisitely beautiful,” Mr. Carradine said. But her non-cookie-cutter looks may “have something to do with why she’s had the kind of career she’s had,” he said. “There is, shall we say, a shallow aspect to who gets to do what in the movies.”

Ms. Plimpton has learned to weather the shallowness. “Maybe in the moment it bothers me,” she said. “But I know what I am so I try not to linger on it. And also in the theater it’s a very different thing. In the theater you can be anything.”

In her case that means turning an effortlessly contemporary personality into a great enduring heroine. “She’s very much of her time, a totally happening gamine spirit, so you have no idea there’s this reserve of classicism there waiting to be tapped,” Mr. O’Brien said. “She puts on the dress and the wig, and you’d think she was in corsets her entire life.”

In fact Ms. Plimpton has worn corsets and wigs in her last three roles. “I’m a total hair actor,” she said, adding: “I don’t consider myself unfeminine at all. I think I’m very girlie. I like lots of products. I like unguents and creams. I could spend hours in a really nice drugstore. But I’m not sure that I match the regular standard of girlie — vulnerable, lovable, malleable.”

But it is her malleability — her openness to chaos — that drives her choices. “I want to be the new guy who doesn’t know anything,” she said. “That is a place of real excitement and pleasure for me, because it means there are no mistakes. There’s no such thing as a mistake when you’re always trying something new.”

As a child she was a perfectionist. Now, as a veteran, she prefers to think that “every day is an opportunity to get something wrong,” she said. During “The Coast of Utopia,” she said, “I sort of decided, well, I’m going to do one thing a year that terrifies me, because why not?”

Last year she met her goal by performing in an improv show at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in Chelsea: “And it was great. It was absolutely terrifying.” She has yet to settle on what frighteningly odd thing to try this year. Suggestions welcome: Myspace.com/marthaplimpton.